Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 7

[Constance]

I've just come across a recent discussion at the consciousagents site that looks as if it might have a bearing on Trehub's model of consciousness and brain.

Time slices and streams

 

[smcder]

Is that ^ you or Searle? I've put it in quotation marks because it has to be one or the other. The ambiguity continues in the sequence of your post below. Is it you writing in roman type and Searle in italics? If so or if not, which statements are whose? Who's speaking?



Is that claim -- that "there is a neurobiological explanatory level" -- meant to exhaust the inquiry into what consciousness is? Does it satisfy you, Steve, or even Searle?



Would you specify what 'road' you mean, and also specify what we are waiting for that might eventually 'appear'? Thanks.

Hi @Constance, I've been offline - let me see if I can straighten this up (Searle's words in italics):

Again, Searle:

Once we overcome that presupposition, the presupposition that the mental and the physical naively construed are mutually exclusive, then it seems to me we have a solution to the traditional mind-body problem.

And here it is:

All of our mental states are caused by neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are themselves realized in the brain as its higher level or system features. So, for example, if you have a pain, your pain is caused by sequences of neuron firings, and the actual realization of the pain experience is in the brain.

I am assuming for the sake of this article that the right functional level for explaining mental phenomena is the level of neurons. It might turn out to be some other level -- micro-tubules, synapses, neuronal maps, whole clouds of neurons, etc. -- but for the purposes of this article it does not matter what the right neurobiological explanatory level is, only that there is a neurobiological explanatory level.

@Constance ... this below is my comments/questions, I've re-written them here from my original post, hopefully for clarity):

Why do we not rest content here?

1. There is no scientific theory of consciousness per se (Searle's [paper "Consciousness" offers some specific places in the brain to look for one - but that doesn't deviate from his footnote above) ... but why don't we just continue down this road until one appears?

It seems to me that is where the interesting part starts - with so many divergent approaches: Tononi, Hoffman - all the various ones we have looked at ... neuro-phenomenology ... Nagel's Mind and Cosmos ... are these just the products of restless imaginations that can't wait for neurobiology to close the gap?

Keep in mind this is Searle's writing from the late 1990s - I'm not sure he is on the same track now, but he can be used as a yardstick for a pretty straightforward physicalist/materialist etc etc view.

@Constance ... so for those of us who aren't content with Searle's view, what underlies that discontent? For me it is an intuition or thought or recognition that consciousness is fundamental.

What I mean by fundamental is:

1. present at the beginning and ubiquitous - a feature, part of the basic furniture of the universe(s)
2. essential - it wouldn't be the universe it is without consciousness
3. irreducible
4. causal

these four interlock - it's hard to see that if consciousness were epiphenomenal (a-causal) that it could be essential, for example

I'm not happy with panpyschism when its presented in analogy to fields or particles (combination problem) - but such talk is very hard to get away from in our language ... Galen Strawson (the video or article above) - based on Russell's idea - that consciousness is the direct experience of the intrinsic nature of matter - the only direct knowledge we have - I like that and I think it's been overlooked, especially overlooked that it came from Russell. (@Soupie But I'm not saying that's my position!)

 

[smcder]

Is that ^ you or Searle? I've put it in quotation marks because it has to be one or the other. The ambiguity continues in the sequence of your post below. Is it you writing in roman type and Searle in italics? If so or if not, which statements are whose? Who's speaking?



Is that claim -- that "there is a neurobiological explanatory level" -- meant to exhaust the inquiry into what consciousness is? Does it satisfy you, Steve, or even Searle?



Would you specify what 'road' you mean, and also specify what we are waiting for that might eventually 'appear'? Thanks.

Is that claim -- that "there is a neurobiological explanatory level" -- meant to exhaust the inquiry into what consciousness is? Does it satisfy you, Steve, or even Searle? - me ... of course not ... Searle? I think so. And it is a very good argument - as an aside, as it could come up later - it's good to note that Searle's position is substrate-dependent - the more I think about physicalist arguments - the more I think they are better off heading toward a "limit point" of identity theory and epiphenomenalism/eliminativism ... being vague about what physicalism is (there are so many good definitions - pick one!) and analogizing to fields or particles, that seems to me to weaken the physicalist position.

But that is not my position ... I am talking strategy for the opposite team - which is to dig in as close to identity theory as possible and hold on, the hard work seems to be on the side of us who don't fully accept these physicalist explanations.

Does that help?

 

[smcder]

Great point. I often wonder the same thing. I would propose that people become invested in their own positions to the extent that change means a loss of one or more elements including credibility, prestige, the comfort of one's own worldview, and possibly even material wealth, particularly if one has been lecturing and writing books for a living that would become irrelevant. Personally, as I've gotten older, I've found that my views tend to change less, not because of any of the aforementioned reasons, but because over time, I've distilled the applicable content from so many sources that new ideas that are substantial enough to compete are rare.

In this entire discussion, there has only been one significant change in my viewpoint, and that has been that I used to see no reason that artificial intelligence could not arise from sufficiently complex and powerful processing systems with the right programming, and that because such an intelligence would be indistinguishable from our own, notions of consciousness were largely irrelevant and in the domain of mystics and philosophers. I have completely changed my view on that because I realized at some point early on in the discussion that intelligence and consciousness may not simply go hand in hand.

Intelligence might be accomplished with the kinds of processors and programming we're used to in our computers, but consciousness might require different materials than our current line of microprocessors, and those materials might also need to be configured in very specific ways. That's why I began alluding to magnetism ( or sometimes light ) as an illustrative comparison, and when I heard Chalmers doing the same thing, I revaluated his views and came to appreciate them a lot more than I originally had, and that's why I've thanked you a number of times for introducing us to his ideas.

Personally, as I've gotten older, I've found that my views tend to change less, not because of any of the aforementioned reasons, but because over time, I've distilled the applicable content from so many sources that new ideas that are substantial enough to compete are rare.

I've become more aware of new ideas as I've gotten older - at the same time I've only recently come to really appreciate history in evaluating ideas.

 

[smcder]

It's not surprising that confusing language should emerge from philosophical discussion ;-)

I'll attempt to clarify. Starting with your chosen example:

"We might roughly characterize the shared meaning thus: emergent entities (properties or substances) ‘arise’ out of more fundamental entities and yet are ‘novel’ or ‘irreducible’ with respect to them. (For example, it is sometimes said that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain.). Emergent Properties (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)​

And we have Chalmers saying: "Consciousness is fundamental." and he compares consciousness to electromagnetism ( as in the Chalmers vidieo here: David Chalmers: How do you explain consciousness? | TED Talk | TED.com )

Now because Chalmers avoids thinking of properties as emergent, instead focusing on behavior, and doesn't explain ( at least anyplace I've seen ) that the word "fundamental" is a situation that arises out of irreducibility and that irreducibility is a key concept of emergentism ( as described above ), there is a sort of explanatory gap where the words "fundamental" and "irreducible" might be seen as synonymous and used in different contexts where their meaning should be differentiated, opening the way for the confusion that may be applicable here.

So, to fill in that gap, let's first accept that properties are also among the list of emergent phenomena and that electromagnetism is for all intent and purpose, an emergent phenomena, and there are many articles out there describing Emergent Electromagnetic Phenomena. For the sake of illustration; here's one example: http://digital.csic.es/bitstream/10261/117431/1/Electromagnetism.pdf

Putting this all together: Because consciousness is irreducible to anything other that itself, Chalmers sees it as something fundamental, which gets the basic point across, but opens the door for confusion between the words "irreducible" and "fundamental" in the context of the definition of "emergent", where consciousness can be seen as an irreducible property rather than irreducible behavior, and because Chalmers himself likens consciousness to emergent phenomena like electromagnetism, his viewpoint when looked at in the context of emergentism ( as defined above ), actually adds-up to a case for consciousness being an emergent property.

This idea IMO is very promising. It leads to a model that essentially says that we cannot reduce consciousness to the brain's matter, electricity, and EM fields, just like we can't reduce magnetism to the core, wire, or the current that makes up a magnet, yet overwhelming amounts of correlative evidence indicate that just like magnetism is dependent upon the existence of a magnet, consciousness is dependent on the existence of a brain, and therefore both appear to be emergent properties of specific types of systems. This points the way to discover relationships between the brain and consciousness that might facilitate practical applications.

On a related note with respect to Searle: It seems to me that Searle doesn't reject the idea that there is something we call consciousness that we identify with as our own personal experience of the world. It's that he sees consciousness as an integral part of the human brain in the same way that we might think magnetism is an integral part of a magnet. Each is integral to what we conceptualize the object to be. Personally, although that view is reasonable, I'm not entirely comfortable with it because it then requires that we redefine our general notions of what a brain is. For example the CPU in our PC is sometimes referred to as a brain, but it's not IMO conscious.

My own view is that the answer to this question is yes. I think there is exactly one clear case of a strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of consciousness.

Putting this all together: Because consciousness is irreducible to anything other that itself, Chalmers sees it as something fundamental, which gets the basic point across, but opens the door for confusion between the words "irreducible" and "fundamental" in the context of the definition of "emergent", where consciousness can be seen as an irreducible property rather than irreducible behavior, and because Chalmers himself likens consciousness to emergent phenomena like electromagnetism, his viewpoint when looked at in the context of emergentism ( as defined above ), actually adds-up to a case for consciousness being an emergent property.

I'm not sure I've seen the property/behavior distinction used in exactly this way in discussions of emergence - are those your terms?

Chalmers on emergence, strong and weak:
http://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf

 

[Constance]

There are at least two levels of investigation of the problem of consciousness that we have been engaging in in this discussion. I'm sure in POM there are phrases for these two levels, but here are the phrases I'll use. The personal level and the ontological level.

It appears that you are still conceptualizing/categorizing what you call “the ontological level” in terms of a totalized objective ‘Reality’ that exists outside of the consciousness that has conceived of ‘ontology’ -- i.e., asks the ontological question -- in the first place. Accordingly you are still seeking an interpretation of the 'meaning' of ‘what-is’ as originating in that variously imagined totalized objective Reality to which we have no access . Thus you seek to locate the natural affordances of awareness, consciousness, and mind in our experienced being inside a neurological box operating from information originating in another, larger, black box that is isolated from the world of human experience. [edited:] By contrast, phenomenological philosophy analyses consciousness as emerging by degrees of experiential awareness of itself/oneself in relation to things and others in a mutually experienced sensable, tangible, environing 'world'; from that basis in worldly experience conscious beings gradually evolve the capability of thinking. In this phenomenological view consciousness is an opening into the nature of existence, accomplished by virtue of experience in and of its local mileau. [edited:] Phenomenological analysis of human experience discloses the phenomenal character of our being-with 'things' and other consciousnesses as and where we are, where we dwell and increasingly understand our being as being-in-the-world {perhaps better expressed as 'being-in-a-world'}.

Consciousness is thus the bridge that connects the phenomenal appearances of what is naturally 'given' and its affordances in our experience, generating our capability of increasingly attentive and intentional experience and reflection on our experience, prereflective experience thus grounding what we are capable of thinking. Consciousness understood phenomenologically as founded in evolving perception is recognized as an emerging and expanding opening to the being of what-is as ineluctably "being-in-the/a-world" with others and with things understood incompletely in our perception. Implicit and subsequently explicit knowledge of our situated being-in-the-world (a compresence of 'things' and 'mind') grounds the ontological space of consciousness within which we also query the ontology of 'All-that-is' and fall short of comprehending it, either philosophically or scientifically to date. As Heidegger wrote, we are still 'on the way' to understanding being {and the Being of which our being might be an expression). Later he doubted that we can understand the nature of Being from our existential situation.

You continue to see the mind-body problem as fatally irresolvable from within the affordances of consciousness as the place of disclosure of the interrelationship of subjectivity and objectivity {also concepts conceived by consciousness on the way to comprehension of its own nature}. Neither concept can be thought without the other. We are in the position of being able to think through the being-together of recognizable subjective and objective poles of 'reality' disclosed in our situated awareness of 'what-is' -- in our experience of what-is. This is the meaning of "the ontological difference"ushered into the world by consciousness and mind.

Phenomenology, the philosophy you will not read (and many others in our time will not read), provides inroads into the ontological meaning of our species’ understanding of the conditions of our being within the conditions of 'being-in-the/a-world', as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and contemporary phenomenologists [Gallagher, Zahavi, Noe, Carbone, and others] continue to examine it. This opening to reflection on what we become aware of and implicitly know is, again, the “ontological difference” that consciousness makes in our understanding of ‘what-is’. We need to recognize ‘what-is’ as including the positionality and experience of conscious being-in-the-world as essential in our attempts to understand the nature of being (and on that ground, once achieved, to speculate on the nature of Being).

You go on to write:

It seems to me that the contribution of the phenomenologists is to provide a deep and rich investigation of consciousness at the personal level. In particular, MP shows us that contrary to what thinkers may have thinked, human perception and conception is is deeply, wholly embodied. So while we may think our thinks are objective and rational, the thoughts we think are really grounded in our humanness.

What do you mean by “our humanness”? What work do you want that term to do? My impression from what you’ve written recently is that you are following Hoffman in his reduction of ‘humanness’ to “a user-interface” with ‘All-that-is’ as assumed to be already constituted by a postulated matrix-like ‘System of Being’. While I see the usefulness of that metaphor to express Hoffman’s conception of ‘what-is’ as 'All-that-is', his arguments do not persuade me to accept his conception of the nature of 'the Being-of-All-that-is' since we lack access to All-that-is, and also because he is unaware of or ignores the foundation in understanding the nature of be-ing [lower case] that is accessible to human beings out of the nature of our own experience as embodied consciousness. It is out of the recognition of the actual situatedness of our own be-ing that we ask the question about Being . . . and find ourselves unable to answer it. Hoffman imagines an answer to that question, which you might choose to accept despite its consisting in a metaphor constructed out of a dominant cultural meme. I can't follow you in that choice.

What is widely not-yet-understood in philosophy of mind (outside of phenomenological POM) is the need to understand how consciousness is rooted in and first emerges within prereflective embodied and embedded experience, which is the ground of that which we become capable of thinking about with the further emergence from it of reflective consciousness and mind. What I first found significant in Trehub’s retinoid model of consciousness was his recognition of prereflective awareness as the core ground from which thinking emerges, but on further reading of Trehub it’s become clear to me that he fails to explore and illuminate the nature of the ‘bridge’ he claims to construct across the explanatory gap recognized in the ‘hard problem’, the supposed gap between preflective and reflective consciousness. The exploration of prereflective experience is the challenging work we need to undertake in consciousness studies in order to account for the emergence of consciousness from ‘what-is’ as we experience it before we are capable of reflecting on it. Prereflective consciousness is, as I have said so often before, the region in which consciousness first senses itself as an opening to a region of being that pre-exists consciousness, a region from which it emerges and constitutes the knowledge of being-in-the/a-world from which we begin to think. Understanding the chiasmic nature of the consciousness-world relationship as illuminated in Merleau-Ponty's later philosophy takes us to the ground from which we need to begin contemplating the mind-body/mind-world problems -- to the 'ontological difference' constituted in the emergence of consciousness in nature recognized by phenomenology as distinct from earlier ontological conceptions of ‘reality’ and ‘mind’.


The following article appearing last year in the Chronicle of Higher Education indicates the intellectual distance between the history of our species thinking in philosophy and other disciplines to the current cultural domination of mechanistic ‘memes’ masquerading as ideas in the academy as well as in popular culture. The dominance of reductive cognitive neuroscience since the middle of the 20th century has erased 'mind' {as formerly understood in terms of the proliferating works of mind in our history and the problems concerning human values understood and expressed in them} and replaced ‘mind’ with 'brain', neurons, neural nets, etc., as the origin of what can be thought by humans and its questionable 'meaning' or significance. I think one unmistakable sign of this sea change in what qualifies as 'thinking' in our time is the reductiveness of 'computationalism' inherent in most neuroscience. Another sign of it consists in contemporary efforts to believe that meaning (if it exists) lies in a controlling sphere of influence in which it is ungraspable by humans thinking from the basis of their empirical experience in the world. Thus it becomes increasingly less important to hold ourselves responsible for what we think and do in the world in which we actually exist, and over which human power structures we tolerate have exercised destructive mismanagement of the ecology on which our own lives and the lives of innumerable other beings depend. We need to extend the concept of 'ecology' to the deep understanding of the social 'economy' within which we coexist in this world with others of all species, including vast numbers of our own species reduced to bare subsistence and desperation as the rest of us stand by and do little or nothing to change this world. (For development of the ideas I've encapsulated in that last sentence, see papers and books by Arkady Plonitsky).


Link to the article in the Chronicle:


Mind Maze

 

[Constance]

. . . ... so for those of us who aren't content with Searle's view, what underlies that discontent? For me it is an intuition or thought or recognition that consciousness is fundamental.

What I mean by fundamental is:

1. present at the beginning and ubiquitous - a feature, part of the basic furniture of the universe(s)
2. essential - it wouldn't be the universe it is without consciousness
3. irreducible
4. causal

these four interlock - it's hard to see that if consciousness were epiphenomenal (a-causal) that it could be essential, for example

I'm not happy with panpyschism when its presented in analogy to fields or particles (combination problem) - but such talk is very hard to get away from in our language ... Galen Strawson (the video or article above) - based on Russell's idea - that consciousness is the direct experience of the intrinsic nature of matter - the only direct knowledge we have - I like that and I think it's been overlooked, especially overlooked that it came from Russell. (@Soupie But I'm not saying that's my position!)

Steve, thank you for clarifying the posts I had difficulty in understanding last week. It's good to see you here, and to recognize you in your consistent and coherent insights into where we are in the effort to understand what consciousness is.

I'm interested among other things in your thoughts concerning Kukai's thought, which I quoted at length, with delight, some days ago. I connected with Kukai [through the magic of Google's search engine] in reading I was doing in response to Trehub's retinoid model of consciousness and questions/comments on it in the first cognitive agents blog I linked in recent days. At the same time I was reading Zahavi on Husserl's founding concepts concerning prereflective consciousness and what Husserl referred to as "passive synthesis." I'm still working through the notes I took during this exploration and might add more, but for now I hope for a discussion of both Kukai's suggestively phenomenological ontology and Husserl's recognition of 'passive synthesis'Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis in prereflective experience emerging in reflective consciousness. For the time being, here's a link to a relevant book by Husserl sampled at Google Books entitled Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental Logic, described as follows:

"Coming from what is arguably the most productive period of Husserl's life, this volume offers the reader a first translation into English of Husserl's renowned lectures on `passive synthesis', given between 1920 and 1926. These lectures are the first extensive application of Husserl's newly developed genetic phenomenology to perceptual experience and to the way in which it is connected to judgments and cognition. They include an historical reflection on the crisis of contemporary thought and human spirit, provide an archaeology of experience by questioning back into sedimented layers of meaning, and sketch the genealogy of judgment in `active synthesis'.

Drawing upon everyday events and personal experiences, the Analyses are marked by a patient attention to the subtle emergence of sense in our lives. By advancing a phenomenology of association that treats such phenomena as bodily kinaesthesis, temporal genesis, habit, affection, attention, motivation, and the unconscious, Husserl explores the cognitive dimensions of the body in its affectively significant surroundings. An elaboration of these diverse modes of evidence and their modalizations (transcendental aesthetic), allows Husserl to trace the origin of truth up to judicative achievements (transcendental logic).

Joined by several of Husserl's essays on static and genetic method, the Analyses afford a richness of description unequalled by the majority of Husserl's works available to English readers. Students of phenomenology and of Husserl's thought will find this an indispensable work."

Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis

 

[smcder]

Not everyone accepts that the mind body problem is a legitimate "problem". Searle calls it a "false dichotomy" and similarly, I would say that the mind-body problem is a scientific problem to the same extent that there's a magnet-magnetism problem or a mass-gravitation problem. That's because science deals with the properties and behavior of the extant, not the nature of existence itself. That's the job of philosophers So the mind-body problem is only a "problem" for philosophers who choose to look at the co-existence of the mind and body as "problematic" in their context, and therefore since the nature of the problem in philosophical terms it's not relevant to science, I would question the relevance of your comment. Searle has no problem saying that we can take an objective and scientific approach to studying subjective experience. I agree.

We know our senses can be fooled and that what we perceive is a mental construct rather than an experience of the actual object being perceived, but this translates to: "Objective external reality isn't what we perceive it to be." not to "There is no objective external reality."

I included the time references ( I do review the content relevant to my posts even though it has been suggested by others at times that I don't )

Hoffman makes it quite clear at the start of the video that we don't perceive photons. We perceive the resulting mental experience that the photons initiate via the biology of our eyes and visual processing centers in the brain. He even has pictures that explain this in no uncertain terms. This is just fine. It's where he wanders off in his suggestion that all reality including spacetime and atoms and so on are also conscious constructs that he falls off the ledge.

If you're alluding to the mind-body problem, as the "problem", then it's not a "problem" for me because I accept that there are both minds and bodies and that they coexist in the universe as physical, in the sense that physical is not to be confused with "material", as in material vs. non-material. So for me, unless you are alluding to a different problem, there is no "problem to overcome". There are only relationships to study.

Not quite. Basically, I'm presupposing that all reality is physical in the sense that that everything that exists has properties and behaviors that lead to arbitrary relationships between them. This is a physicalist ( as opposed to materialist ) perspective because the "physical" isn't simply what we perceive to be "material". To be more specific there are branches of Physicalism and although I'm not sure where the philosophers would place me if they were able to see inside my head, it seems that I'm somewhere off in the realm of Emergentism. This seems to be a good overview: http://www.brynmawr.edu/biology/emergence/stephan.pdf

I don't actually "insist" that consciousness is physical but I do look at it as a physical phenomenon in the same way as we look at other phenomena like gravity, magnetism, etc. as being physical phenomena, and are equally perplexed as to the fundamental nature of their existence, but nevertheless have been able to map out their relationships to other materials and phenomena in a way that has proven to be very useful in many practical applications.

I'm not sure what would qualify in your comment as "beginning to support this claim.", but I would say that the number of posts I've contributed more than constitute a "beginning" and most are either based on or include accepted scientific information, particularly those that directly correlate brain function to conscious experience, and those that explore the idea that consciousness is an emergent property.

I'll close this post by saying that somewhat ironically, even though Chalmers criticizes emergentism, he also favors the idea that consciousness is something fundamental, which is also a feature of emergent phenomena. So Chalmers is actually endorsing emergentism, and his objection to it because it doesn't explain why consciousness should be accompanied by brain material and EM fields, is irrelevant. We may never be able to explain why consciousness should be accompanied by brain material and EM fields just like we may never know why objects should have mass.

Why type questions imply some purpose, and purpose is a concept that only has meaning to entities that are capable of understanding that concept, which is only a very small subset of all which appears to exist. So there is no reason "why" many things happen unless we invoke some omniscient God and claim it's all because of his or her divine will. In short: In the absence of a creator there is no "why" answer for fundamental phenomena. There is simply acceptance that it exists. Feynman goes through a rather long winded and painful explanation of this below as well:

Why Type Questions - Feynman

​

I'll close this post by saying that somewhat ironically, even though Chalmers criticizes emergentism, he also favors the idea that consciousness is something fundamental, which is also a feature of emergent phenomena. So Chalmers is actually endorsing emergentism, and his objection to it because it doesn't explain why consciousness should be accompanied by brain material and EM fields, is irrelevant. We may never be able to explain why consciousness should be accompanied by brain material and EM fields just like we may never know why objects should have mass.

The Chalmers paper on Strong and Weak Emergence

http://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf

... should make his position clear:

I think there is exactly one clear case of a strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of consciousness.

Two other seminal papers by Chalmers are:

Consciousness and its Place in Nature in which our hero provides an expanded taxonomy of views on consciousness

and

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

 

[Soupie]

It is out of the recognition of the actual situatedness of our own be-ing that we ask the question about Being . . . and find ourselves unable to answer it.

Maybe we need more knowledge. Maybe the question includes incorrect presuppositions. Maybe the question is absurd. Probably all three and more.

On a related note, @smcder has noted many times that the Hard Problem is only a problem for physicalists. While this was duly noted, I couldn't conceive of an alternative.

Thanks to comments by Michael Allen, I now find the notion that consciousness is constituted of, or emerged from, matter as being illogical. (Per his most recent posts, he doesn't see it that way.)

My fascination with the Hard Problem and the MUI aporia is due to the way in which they reveal our limited understanding of what-is. I find this exciting rather than upsetting.

 

[Constance]

I'll close this post by saying that somewhat ironically, even though Chalmers criticizes emergentism, he also favors the idea that consciousness is something fundamental, which is also a feature of emergent phenomena. So Chalmers is actually endorsing emergentism, and his objection to it because it doesn't explain why consciousness should be accompanied by brain material and EM fields, is irrelevant. We may never be able to explain why consciousness should be accompanied by brain material and EM fields just like we may never know why objects should have mass.

The Chalmers paper on Strong and Weak Emergence

http://consc.net/papers/emergence.pdf

... should make his position clear:

I think there is exactly one clear case of a strongly emergent phenomenon, and that is the phenomenon of consciousness.

Two other seminal papers by Chalmers are:

Consciousness and its Place in Nature in which our hero provides an expanded taxonomy of views on consciousness

and

Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness

Agreed. Those three papers are seminal in consciousness studies and should be read early by anyone entering this field of discourse.

It occurred to me today that the hermeneutic circle and its extension in Heidegger's 'ontological turn' might be the most efficient way to finally clarify the difference between ontology as conceived in physicalism/materialism and in phenomenological ontology. SEP provides an excellent article on the history of hermeneutics that includes the following explication of Heidegger's 'turn' in Being and Time.

"4. The Ontological Turn

Informed by his reading of Schleiermacher, Droysen, and Dilthey, Martin Heidegger's Sein und Zeit (1927) completely transformed the discipline of hermeneutics. In Heidegger's view, hermeneutics is not a matter of understanding linguistic communication. Nor is it about providing a methodological basis for the human sciences. As far as Heidegger is concerned, hermeneutics is ontology; it is about the most fundamental conditions of man's being in the world. Yet Heidegger's turn to ontology is not completely separated from earlier hermeneutic philosophies. Just as Vico had started out with a critique of the Cartesian notion of certainty, so Heidegger sets out to overthrow what he takes to be the Cartesian trajectory of modern philosophical reason.

For Descartes, Heidegger argues, the task of philosophy is to show how the subject can rationally establish the norms of epistemic certainty whereby a given representation is judged to be true or false. From such a position, he continues, the way is not long to a conception of truth in terms of the methods provided by the natural sciences alone. Such a model, however, tends to forget the most fundamental, pre-scientific aspects of our being in the world. This is the area of Heidegger's hermeneutics. As such, hermeneutics no longer emerges as one of several philosophical possibilities. Rather, hermeneutics—the hermeneutics of facticity, as Heidegger calls it—is what philosophy is all about in the first place.

This reflects back on Heidegger's definition of terms such as understanding, interpretation, and assertion. Understanding, in Heidegger's account, is neither a method of reading nor the outcome of a willed and carefully conducted procedure of critical reflection. It is not something we consciously do or fail to do, but something we are. Understanding is a mode of being, and as such it is characteristic of human being, of Dasein. The pre-reflective way in which Dasein inhabits the world is itself of a hermeneutic nature. Our understanding of the world presupposes a kind of pragmatic know-how that is revealed through the way in which we, without theoretical considerations, orient ourselves in the world. We open the door without objectifying or conceptually determining the nature of the door-handle or the doorframe. The world is familiar to us in a basic, intuitive way. Most originally, Heidegger argues, we do not understand the world by gathering a collection of neutral facts by which we may reach a set of universal propositions, laws, or judgments that, to a greater or lesser extent, corresponds to the world as it is. The world is tacitly intelligible to us.

The fundamental familiarity with the world is brought to reflective consciousness through the work of interpretation. Interpretation, however, does not have to be of a propositional nature. At stake is the explicit foregrounding of a given object, as in the experience of the dysfunctional hammer all of a sudden materializing in all its lack of hammer-usefulness. At this point, we are forced to stop hammering. As if awakened to a new level of alertness, the tacit activity of hammering is replaced by the sudden awareness of what a hammer is for. Interpretation makes things, objects, the fabric of the world, appear as something, as Heidegger puts it. Still, this as is only possible on the background of the world as a totality of practices and intersubjective encounters, of the world that is opened up by Dasein's being understandingly there.

At this point, we have still not reached the level at which we, according to Heidegger, would locate the idea of truth as agreement between judgment and world. Yet a truth it is nonetheless—the truth of world-disclosure. Through the synthesizing activity of understanding, the world is disclosed as a totality of meaning, a space in which Dasein is at home.

Only through assertion is the synthesizing activity of understanding and interpretation brought to language. In disclosing the as-structure of a thing, the hammer as a hammer, interpretation discloses its meaning. Assertion, then, pins this meaning down linguistically. The linguistic identification of a thing is, in other words, not original but is predicated on the world-disclosive synthesis of understanding and interpretation. This also applies with regard to the truth-value of the assertion. The world-disclosive truth of understanding is more fundamental than the truth presented through the propositional structure “s is p,” and prior, also, to the reflectively grounded certainty maintained by the Cartesian philosopher.

This Heideggerian reformulation of the problem of truth gives rise to a new conception of the hermeneutic circle. In Spinoza, Ast, and Schleiermacher, the hermeneutic circle was conceived in terms of the mutual relationship between the text as a whole and its individual parts, or in terms of the relation between text and tradition. With Heidegger, however, the hermeneutic circle refers to something completely different: the interplay between our self-understanding and our understanding the world. The hermeneutic circle is no longer perceived as a helpful philological tool, but entails an existential task with which each of us is confronted.

According to Heidegger, Dasein is distinguished by its self-interpretatory endeavors. Daseinis a being whose being appears as an issue. However, because Dasein is fundamentally embedded in the world, we simply cannot understand ourselves without the detour through the world, and the world cannot be understood without reference to Dasein's way of life. This, however, is a perpetual process. Hence, what is precarious here is not, as in the earlier hermeneutic tradition, the moment when we are able to leave the hermeneutic circle, where our interpretative endeavors culminate in a lucid, clear, and indubitable grasp of the meaning of the text. What matters, Heidegger claims, is the attempt to enter the circle in the right way, with a willingness to realize that the investigation into the ontological conditions of my life ought to work back on the way in which my life is led.

With this turn towards ontology, the problems of philology become secondary. Hermeneutics now deals with the meaning—or lack of meaning—of human life: it is turned into an existential task."

Hermeneutics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

 

[Constance]

Constance said: ↑
"It is out of the recognition of the actual situatedness of our own be-ing that we ask the question about Being . . . and find ourselves unable to answer it."

Maybe we need more knowledge. Maybe the question includes incorrect presuppositions. Maybe the question is absurd. Probably all three and more.

We need more knowledge in particular about the phenomenal nature of our experience of/in the world -- the ground out of which we enter into our capabilities of reflecting on and thinking about the nature of 'reality' as 'what-is', which on examination turns out inescapably to include our perspectival access to it.

What do you think might be called "incorrect presuppositions" in our recognition of our own temporal, situated, be-ing and the further postulation of Being as extending beyond the horizons of what we can perceive and understand?

On what basis are you suggesting that our questions about being and Being might be "absurd"?

On a related note, @smcder has noted many times that the Hard Problem is only a problem for physicalists. While this was duly noted, I couldn't conceive of an alternative.

Phenomenological understanding of the nature of consciousness and mind is the alternative I've offered, but for some reason you've been unwilling to explore it. There are other alternatives presented in Eastern philosophies, which Steve has discussed.

Thanks to comments by Michael Allen, I now find the notion that consciousness is constituted of, or emerged from, matter as being illogical. (Per his most recent posts, he doesn't see it that way.)

My impression is that @Michael Allen is working on the same issues we are, but I have not yet been able to understand fully much of what he writes. I wish he would write here more frequently and also engage in dialogues/multilogues on major issues in understanding the nature and origin of consciousness

My fascination with the Hard Problem and the MUI aporia is due to the way in which they reveal our limited understanding of what-is. I find this exciting rather than upsetting.

I don't think anyone here finds the exploration of philosophical and scientific approaches to consciousness to be upsetting. For me this project is endlessly interesting.

 

[Constance]

I need to correct what I posted in post 206 a few days ago. I inadvertently failed to requote correctly a post from part 4, substituting material from Michael Bitbol for the following from Max Velmans:

Max Velmans, "From West toward East in Five Simple Steps"

"Drawing on some aspects of Reflexive Monism, this talk suggests how one can move from a careful, Western analysis of ordinary conscious experience towards a more Eastern understanding of its transformative potential in five simple steps.

Step 1: accept that the boundaries of ordinary conscious experience encompass the entire phenomenal world, which requires an understanding of reflexivity and perceptual projection.

Step 2: accept that experiences arise from somewhere—that there is a chain of normally unconscious/preconscious causation that precedes the arising of each experience that one can investigate in both a third- and first-person way.

Step 3: accept that it is only when entities, events and processes are directly experienced that they become real-ized in the sense of becoming subjectively real, and that this applies not just to everyday conscious processes such as speaking, reading and thinking, but also to one’s conscious sense of Self.

Step 4: accept an expanded sense of Self that includes not just one’s conscious Ego but also the unconscious embedding and supporting ground of which it is an expression.

Step 5: accept that human consciousness is not a “freak accident of nature”; rather it is one natural expression of what the universe is like (although we have some way to go to discover the precise psychophysical laws that govern how conscious experiences relate to their associated material forms).

I then show how these aspects of Reflexive Monism take one in the direction of Advaita Vedanta and other forms of perennial philosophy—although the point of balance between Eastern and Western ways of understanding mind, consciousness and self may need to be somewhere midway between the two.

Suggested readings: the book Understanding Consciousness Edition 2 (2009-particularly Chapters 12 and 14); online papers: "How to arrive at an Eastern Place from a Western direction" (2013); "Reflexive Monism: Psychophysical relations among mind, matter and consciousness" (2012); "Reflexive Monism" (2008). Note: These and other papers by Velmans are available at academia.edu.


For the related video lecture by Velmans go to this post from part 4:

Consciousness and the Paranormal — Part 4

 

[Soupie]

What do you think might be called "incorrect presuppositions" in our recognition of our own temporal, situated, be-ing and the further postulation of Being as extending beyond the horizons of what we can perceive and understand?

On what basis are you suggesting that our questions about being and Being might be "absurd"?

That we are beings existing within Being.

The Hard Problem and the UI aporia. (Edit: I tried to clarify the "ui aporia" below; i dubbed it the Subset of Reality Problem.)

Phenomenological understanding of the nature of consciousness and mind is the alternative I've offered, but for some reason you've been unwilling to explore it.

You've recently stated that you interpret phenomenology to be an emergentist account of consciousness. That is a physicalist account of consciousness, not an alternative to physicalism.

 

[Soupie]

The Subset of Reality Problem

(1) Humans are experiencing beings.

(2) However, we can only infer this about others based on our own experiencing.

(3) Subsequently, we must infer the existence of a reality beyond all our individual experiencing.

(4) Ergo, experience is a subset of a larger reality.

What are some things that follow from this problem?

Explaining experience via the phenomena that appear within experience is unpossible.

Reality is much more vast and complex than our experience of reality, which is only a subset of reality.

Our (human) experience—how it feels, looks, smells, tastes—is only a small subset of reality, and thus not reflective of all of reality. Or even most of it.

There are causal forces at play within reality beyond our experience of reality, which is only a subset of reality.

There may be intelligent agents operating within reality outside of our experience of reality.

Etc.

 

[Constance]

The Subset of Reality Problem

(1) Humans are experiencing beings.

(2) However, we can only infer this about others based on our own experiencing.

(3) Subsequently, we must infer the existence of a reality beyond all our individual experiencing.

(4) Ergo, experience is a subset of a larger reality.

What are some things that follow from this problem?

Explaining experience via the phenomena that appear within experience is unpossible.

Reality is much more vast and complex than our experience of reality, which is only a subset of reality.

Our (human) experience—how it feels, looks, smells, tastes—is only a small subset of reality, and thus not reflective of all of reality. Or even most of it.

There are causal forces at play within reality beyond our experience of reality, which is only a subset of reality.

There may be intelligent agents operating within reality outside of our experience of reality.

Etc.

@Soupie, no time to respond to each of your statements at the moment, only to add food for further thought.

From Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak):

"In this play of representation, the point of origin becomes ungraspable. There are things like reflecting pools and images, an infinite reference from one to the other, but no longer a source, a spring. There is no longer a simple origin. For what is reflected is split in itself and not only as an addition to itself of its image. The reflection, the image, the double, splits what it doubles. The origin of the speculation becomes a difference. What can look at itself is not one; and the law of the addition of the origin to its representation, of the thing to its image, is that one plus one makes at least three."

 

[Constance]

Explaining experience via the phenomena that appear within experience is unpossible.
Reality is much more vast and complex than our experience of reality, which is only a subset of reality.
Our (human) experience—how it feels, looks, smells, tastes—is only a small subset of reality, and thus not reflective of all of reality. Or even most of it.

Human experience involves far more than sense data, Soupie. [See the citations I posted recently to papers and books on 'cognitive phenomenology'.] It seems to me that if you actually believed that all that you experience consists in 'feelings, looks, smells, tastes', you would not have engaged for several years now in an effort to understand consciousness and mind.

There are causal forces at play within reality beyond our experience of reality, which is only a subset of reality.

Granted there are objectively describable objective processes at work in nature, but they become 'describable' in the first place on the basis of their phenomenal appearances in human experience and our species' subsequent activities in both philosophical and scientific investigation of parts and aspects of nature and speculations, on that basis, concerning the complete structure of nature itself. You liked the idea presented by one writer whose name I've forgotten that the human brain contains the entirety of the universe, cosmos, 'imagined World as a whole' -- that all of this exists within the skull and perhaps nowhere else. You opposed Velmans's critical account of what that 'idea' tells us about consciousness and mind in terms of the reflexivity of human thinking. {We might do well to go back to that discussion and examine Velmans's dual-aspect monism in more detail through reading him together.}

I think it is misleading to define human experience and thought as you do now as a "subset of reality," implying that 'reality' can be thought only from a position outside of our (and other living species') experience -- that is, from the location of a viewpoint that exists 'everywhere' or 'nowhere' and to which we have no direct access. How do we humans come to the point of such speculations? It must be the case that we think beyond the visible from our position within the visible aspects (phenomenal appearances available to to us) of the environment within which we experience our physical mileau and begin to think about it. In fact, subjective perspectives on 'what-is'/'reality' near at hand (and thence postulated to extend beyond the horizons of the locally visible) are precisely what initiates our acquaintance with and recognition of the objective pole of 'what-is' as sensed, experienced, and eventually thought about from the basis of our experience as a crossing of objective and subjective poles of reality.

To avoid radical Cartesian dualism (which you have long sought to do in surveying various monistic theories), we need to comprehend the intersection of subjective and objective poles in and of what we experience as the fundamental ground of consciousness and mind, of what we think. The concepts of being and of Being originate in and are borne out of our temporally situated experiences of consciously embodied being. This recognition has been expressed in various yet-inchoate ways in the history of Western philosophy but not empirically confronted until the development of phenomenological philosophy. This philosophy and the phenomenological neuroscience now in early stages of development will not fulfill the desires and goals of materialists/physicalists in philosophy and science who are committed to the presuppositional belief that the insight we attain and the meaning we forge in our existence are insignificant and irrelevant to the desired comprehension of a wholly 'Objective Reality' in which we are cogs -- in which, according to contemporary computationalist memes, we are reduced to outputs of information originating from a reified 'system of systems' that somehow accounts for all that we experience and think.

In your first statement/claim in this post you wrote:

Explaining experience via the phenomena that appear within experience is unpossible.

In fact, phenomenology approaches and reveals the complex nature of consciousness through analysis of what is presented to us in the phenomenal appearances of things -- to both prereflective and reflective levels of our consciousness -- and gradually integrated semiotically and meaningfully in our construction of social and cultural 'worlds'. I think you are one of many people today who have accepted the claims of standard neuroscience that the mechanics of neural systems and nets account independently and comprehensively for the depth, variety, and complexity of our worldly experience and the scope of our proliferating thought. But as is plain, the central concerns of our thinking relate to the nature and structure of the given natural world and the relation of human consciousness and mind to it from our position within it. You mentioned looking for and not having found an alternative to purely physicalist/objectivist approaches to conscious and mind but have yet to explore the phenomenological approach that reveals the 'unpossibility' of understanding consciousness and mind in purely 'objectivist' terms.

 

[Constance]

Coming back to this from another of your recent posts:

I wrote:↑

"Phenomenological understanding of the nature of consciousness and mind is the alternative I've offered, but for some reason you've been unwilling to explore it."

You responded:

"You've recently stated that you interpret phenomenology to be an emergentist account of consciousness. That is a physicalist account of consciousness, not an alternative to physicalism."

As Steve @smcder suggested a while back, we need to acquaint ourselves with the differences among the variety of theories grouped under the umbrella term 'emergentist'. The value of the concept of emergence for phenomenology is that it recognizes that our existence, experience, consciousness, and mind have evolved in nature though we have as yet a considerably limited understanding of 'nature' and thus are not in a position to declare that 'nature' can be described wholly in terms of physical 'mechanisms'.

This paper, which I linked a few weeks back, responds directly to this problematic situation and to the contemporary philosophical and scientific project of seeking to reconcile naturalism and phenomenology:

David Morris, "From the nature of meaning to the phenomenological reconfiguring of nature," published by Cambridge University Press in
Phenomenology and Naturalism: Volume 72: Examining the Relationship between Human Experience and Nature. Evan Thompson, in his NDPR review of that volume (also linked previously), describes Morris's paper as follows:

"David Morris pursues a more radical approach, which he calls the "phenomenological reconfiguring of nature." He follows Merleau-Ponty in using phenomenology to trace the emergence of meaning from the body, while using contemporary evolutionary-developmental biology ("evo-devo") to show how life-regulation processes generate forms of meaning or sense-making that underlie and motivate human conceptual cognition. For Morris, life is a "transcendental field" prior to reflective consciousness, and is both causally enabling and constitutive of mind and consciousness."

http://spectrum.library.concordia.ca/977292/1/nature_of_meaning_published.pdf

 

[Pharoah]

Whoops. I didn't notice the new thread #7. I've got some catching up to do

 

[Soupie]

I think it is misleading to define human experience and thought as you do now as a "subset of reality," implying that 'reality' can be thought only from a position outside of our (and other living species') experience -- that is, from the location of a viewpoint that exists 'everywhere' or 'nowhere' and to which we have no direct access. How do we humans come to the point of such speculations? It must be the case that we think beyond the visible from our position within the visible aspects (phenomenal appearances available to to us) of the environment within which we experience our physical mileau and begin to think about it. In fact, subjective perspectives on 'what-is'/'reality' near at hand (and thence postulated to extend beyond the horizons of the locally visible) are precisely what initiates our acquaintance with and recognition of the objective pole of 'what-is' as sensed, experienced, and eventually thought about from the basis of our experience as a crossing of objective and subjective poles of reality.

I'm not sure in which sense the concept is misleading. And I don't see how you show that it is misleading.

Conscious experience is reality. For each one of us, reality is contained within our experience. We know reality because we experience.

However, if we accept that there are other minds—other experiencing entities—than we must accept that reality extends beyond our experience of reality.

Ergo, our experience of reality is but a subset of reality.

There are lots of interesting things that follow from this simple concept. One thing that follows is a different perspective on the Hard Problem: explaining experience via the phenomena that arise within experience has so far proved fruitless.

However, as (individual) experience is but a subset of a larger reality, it seems likely that the preconditions of experience exist outside of experience.

That non-experiential reality is radically different than the subset of human experience (of reality) is a powerful idea and one that provides a new understanding of the hp aporia.

 

[Constance]

However, as (individual) experience is but a subset of a larger reality, it seems likely that the preconditions of experience exist outside of experience.

No doubt preconditions of 'lived experience' originate in whatever enables lived experience (protoconscious and conscious) in evolving species of life on earth (and we suppose elsewhere where life has evolved). The challenge of learning what those preconditions/enabling conditions have been stands as an enormous unanswered question in consciousness studies, philosophy of mind, evolutionary science, systems theory, biology, physics, and other disciplines. You prefer to speculate on the unknown and remote preconditions of consciousness and mind, whereas phenomenological philosophy and sciences informed by it seek to comprehend the actual lived nature of consciousness as it exists in our experience of ourselves in a palpable, sensable, thinkable worldly situation. The project of "naturalizing phenomenology" is now activated in consciousness studies and sciences concerned with understanding what consciousness is. Consciousness as we experience it is at the center of this interdisciplinary project. I suggest reading the David Morris paper linked above as an entree into this discourse, which as I see it necessarily requires familiarity with phenomenology itself.

That non-experiential reality is radically different than the subset of human experience (of reality) is a powerful idea and one that provides a new understanding of the hp aporia.

Sure, but this 'powerful idea' is nothing new in the history of philosophy and has been most fully articulated as a philosophical problem in phenomenology. This 'powerful idea' is embedded in the background from which Chalmers famously foregrounds it as 'the hard problem' confronting the philosophy of mind and also the philosophy of science and nature. This ancient problem continues to point to the terrain of experience that must be worked to approach an understanding of what consciousness is -- and of the 'ontological difference' it produces (identified by Heidegger). See again the SEP explication of the hermeneutic circle raised to ontological status by Heidegger in his thinking toward the relation of being to Being.

We can come to understand more fully the nature of our being as embodied consciousness, which lays inescapable reponsibilities upon us in the agency it reveals in the actual 'world' in which we exist, sensed in philosophy before the phenomenological turn in human concepts of morality and ethics. The evolution of consciousness itself initiates the opening of the site at which subjective and objective aspects of being cross in a chiasmic relation of mind and world that Merleau-Ponty described in his later works. While we can come to comprehend this relation and its existential significance for how we live and what we do -- and rationally postulate that the nature of our being is an expression of the Being of all that is -- the nature of Being as a Whole continues to elude us . . . except in certain experiences reported by humans throughout our recorded history in which individuals claim to have briefly sensed and understood the whole in which our experience is contained. That is why this thread was titled "Consciousness and the Paranormal." I think it's time we entertained the range and meaning of paranormal experiences of which humans are conscious to discover their contributions to our understanding of consciousness. That would constitute a move beyond the past several years here in which we have primarily discussed materialist/physicalist/computationalist-informational approaches to the question of what consciousness is and what it enables.